THE alternative for children 12 and younger to access free medical care at the University Hospital of the West Indies due to increasing admissions at the Bustamante Hospital for Children (BHC) has offered some relief.

According to the senior medical officer at BHC Dr Michelle-Ann Richards Dawson, while there has been a slight change in admission numbers, more children are being admitted for gastroenteritis issues.

“That has made some difference in terms of the numbers of the impact on the hospital, and we are grateful for that,” said Richards Dawson during an interview following the launch of the BHC 60th anniversary celebrations.

“It has been a lifting of heavy burden but we still have a significant number of children requiring admission and we endeavour to ensure the public is aware that if challenges increase waiting time, we announce that and we say to the public, that you seek alternative interventions where possible,” she said.

In a release on Monday, the Ministry of Health and Wellness made the announcement about alternative assistance, noting that the decision was in light of the increase in admissions being experienced at the BHC due to respiratory illnesses.

Health Minister Dr Christopher Tufton noted that while plans are being made to provide 100 additional beds at the facility, there will always be a crowding out effect depending on what is happening at a particular time.

“Overcrowding is also a feature of health care and public health care in particular; you never really build out capacity to cater to overcrowding, you build capacity to optimise your space requirements based on what would be sort of a mean number of visits, but you can’t predict outlier events, as accurately as you would like,” Tufton said.

“So if there is an outbreak, like now we have an upper respiratory challenge, what we have to do is move around for those provisions to be made for those outlier events. Where I think we will address some of that is through the construction of the Western Children and Adolescent Hospital in Montego Bay. We have to put in another centre of excellence to allow both to coexist and minimise the strain that Bustamante has to undergo,” he added.

At the same time, board chairman for the South East Regional Health Authority Wentworth Charles said further developments are being made to deal with overcrowding.

“We have some overcrowding and as chairman, I can tell you that we are now looking at the infrastructure in a serious way. We know you have problems with the water, we digging out the old pipes, we doing the assessment now and we going to make Bustamante be the premier institution in the Caribbean,” he said.

— Brittny Hutchinson